Opower Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The recruiter was really helpful and gave me a lot of good tips that are useful everywhere. I thought the interview went okay, and I had a good discussion with the Directors. It was a surprise to get the feedback that I was senior enough to be hired for a senior software position, but not senior enough to build a team around, especially since I applied for the Senior Software Position. It seemed like almost every interviewer asked the same questions about algorithms, which was different from another company I interviewed with around the same time where each interviewer focused on a different area of expertise.

I applied through a university career website and got contacted for a phone interview within a week. The phone interview was about an hour long and involved live coding in an online document where the interviewer typed questions and I wrote code for them, using Java. These coding questions were pretty basic. After that, I scheduled an on-site interview for the following week, which lasted 4 hours and included four 45-60 minute interviews. The on-site questions were tougher than the phone screen but not extremely difficult. The first interview focused on a coding question using stacks and queues. The second involved a design question with a state diagram. The third was an algorithm question about shuffling a deck of cards. The final interview was a behavioral one with the engineering director. In the technical interviews, I'd start by explaining my approach, but the interviewers usually asked me to start coding immediately, even if it wasn't the most optimal solution, and then we'd work on improving it. I felt I performed quite well, getting what I thought were the right answers. However, two weeks later, I was informed I didn't get the job. I know others who applied and were rejected with similar experiences. It seems Opower might prefer candidates with more experience than new graduates.

So the interview process has at least two parts: first a phone screen with a coding exercise and general software development discussion, and then a full day of on-site interviews. The phone screen was pretty good, the interviewer was nice and the coding was at a good level. The on-site part was less good though, mainly because of issues with the specific role and how the two-hour coding session went. It seems like they expected me to know some niche tools and languages that weren't mentioned anywhere before, which was a surprise. Since I didn't know them, it made for an awkward coding session and probably wasted everyone's time. Given how much time they ask from you during the interview and from employees, I wish they had been clearer about this upfront. This left me with a bad impression. Maybe they were testing how I'd handle unexpected challenges, but there was no indication of that, and since I did learn some of the tools and completed some coding, but still didn't get an offer after everything else went well, I'm not sure. Also, the tools they tested are used in production, so it would have made sense to mention them earlier.